


Between A Dagger And Mushy Feeling In Your Stomach

by DissociatingGhost



Category: Gintama
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Collect-it-all-Yorozuya, M/M, Oblivious, Of guns, Semi-competent on their own?, T for curses, Treasure Hunting, Underpowered Characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27857737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DissociatingGhost/pseuds/DissociatingGhost
Summary: He clenched his jaw and looked ahead of him.[..]What a fool. The rules-loving archaeologist shouldn't have believed him, the man he called thief and swindler, when he had said he got a plan.He had lied.
Relationships: Hijikata Toshirou/Sakata Gintoki
Kudos: 11





	Between A Dagger And Mushy Feeling In Your Stomach

**Author's Note:**

> Be aware since Gintoki has never met Shoyou in this AU, his moral compass can be a bit different. And imaginary job descriptions, cliche hidden treasures places, no beta;)

" Let’s be honest - you have nowhere to run.” The footsteps stopped a length of an arm from Gintoki.

Everything halted, ceased to thrumming in his ears.

His skin prickled. It felt as if something was crawling on it, slowly but steadfastly; it pressed against it, choked the air out of his lungs, and erased any line of thought. Dense, tangible like a knife pressed against a throat. The presence of the other man - at the tips of his fingers. Looming. Threatening. 

_I’m not here. I’m lazy Saturday morning, milk with no flavor, four-eyed; something light, or plain, with no substance_.

For a moment an urge to squeeze his eyes shut and pretend he was somewhere else was difficult to resist. However, somehow he suspected it would be as loud as a creaking of a door or a crashing of a waterfall. And he would rather meet his fate with eyes wide-opened, knowing exactly whom he is kicking and where.

_Nonexistent. We are not here; irrelevant shitty fly dots on the canvas of life. The kids in your school you never paid attention to. Just move already, I have cockroaches to feed._

After what felt like an eternity, the man started walking across the room. Gintoki could breathe again. To some degree, at least; under sheets, gathering dust for decades, the air was hot and stifling.

“ No one will come for your help or will find this place any soon. You made sure of that,” the thug went on as if they were catching up over a cup of tea.

In hindsight - _yeah_. What can go wrong with going to a secret place and destroying the only map leading to it? Heads up: a lot, starting with getting stuck in a deserted place with thugs tailing on you. Who could know?

“ We already got here, and you have no way of avoiding us. Why resist the inevitable?"

For a moment, despite himself, Gintoki considered it. It sounded almost tempting - to give up, to no fight this anymore. He was no mobster, after all, why would he think he got equal chances standing against one? Wouldn’t it be better to try to appeal to him?

But then he heard it. Loading of the gun. In the silence of the abandoned temple, it was as loud and clear as a dropping of a grenade.

Shiiit. Whoever told him that treasure hunting was a fun way to pay back debts -

\- A gunshot fired above his head, an eardrums-tearing explosion of noise;

\- was a lying through his teeth piece of dung.

Pots clattered around him as he covered his ears.

 _A lying dung beetle past-Gin-san._

His legs were getting sore from crouching behind some ancient sculpture while his bladder chose that exact moment to remind him about its presence with piercing persistence; whiny weakling. Why did he have to think about waterfalls?!

The glass shattered around him, and he dove closer to the sculpture.

The silence that fell afterward ringed in the ears.

He froze, not daring to move, but then the thug's voice reached him, muttering something indistinguishable in a further part of the temple. Apparently, he was strolling and talking to himself as if an old man on a Sunday afternoon walk. 

An old man armed with a gun and shooting whenever he felt like it. In no rush to catch them because, as it has been established, where they could run?

Gintoki almost sprained his neck to look across the room.

The archeologist, previously hiding behind boxes with stolen jewelry, was busy brushing some dirt off his shirt, but when he caught his eyes, he immediately glared at him. Gintoki almost could hear his voice, _I'm killing you, the moment we are getting alive out of here._

Gintoki half-stifled his laugh, half-choked on his breath. Oh gosh. For a split moment, he felt like crying. Hijikata's ability to get mad at him no matter the circumstances was truly admirable.

He clenched his jaw and looked ahead of him. It seemed Hijikata wasn't blaming him for dragging him into this mess. No more than usual, at least, for tampering historical sites and smuggling national treasures, blah blah blah.

What a fool. The rules-loving archaeologist shouldn't have believed him, the man he called thief and swindler, when he had said he got a plan.

He had lied.

Of course, he had; Hijikata was never the part of any plan; besides, why did he need one when he was so much better at dealing with whatever mess he got himself into at the spot?

Or he had thought so. Now that tiny mistake in judgment could cost both of their lives.

It all has started with the other.

_He was sure he was careful._

Not too careful, getting tight-lipped and disappearing from the surface of the Earth, stopping telling everyone and their twice removed cousins that they shouldn’t underestimate him, he was earning his money fulfilling big shots fantasies, after all,

\- get your mind out of the gutter; it only meant he helped them to get their hands on some ancient, rare, or straight-up bizarre items for their private collections to try to impress their friends or moon over them in privacy or whatever they were doing with them,

\- so one day he surely was going to find some fancy treasure and work no more.

No, he was still running his mouth in pubs and losing money in bets. A harmless dreamer, blabbering idiot with gambling problems - that was an image he was striking for. You could find out a lot of things when people underestimated you and treated you like an idiot.

_That's how far he was willing to go._

You all could pratter how money didn't matter, couldn't give you happiness as long as you didn't have it inside of you, or finally, were just social construct and should be abolished, but at the end of the day, they made all the difference whether someone who didn't have the luxury to spit out things like that, would survive or not. 

Ask any child scraping by in slums. 

Even if the child grew up and moved to better things in his life, he could still be tainted by the poverty he had experienced. There always would be a whisper at the edge of his mind, _It's alright now, but will be so tomorrow? You should earn more, save more, never be at ease._

What could he do when he stumbled upon an old map showing a way to a stolen fortune? 

Yes, he knew he was watched - it went with a job description, wandering on the thin line between grey area and an underground black market of smugglers of antiquities. He was safe as long as he was no threat to them and didn’t tamper with their business.

And _this_? _This_ was smashing right into their car, breaking into their bedroom, and taking away their favorite plushie.

What could he do when just thinking about that moment of finding the map he felt a swoony rush in his chest and his mouth got watery? _The potential; the possibilities._ He would be a bloody idiot not worth of damn permed hair if he had let the opportunity pass - why would he? 

He could find it on his own, without letting anyone know.

_...Yeah._

That's where it got all wrong.

In the middle of the night, he had jolted awake with a gasp of a drowning man drawing his first breath of air. His head felt heavy, thick with sleep, mouth dry. Groggy, he darted glances around a room to see what had woken him at such an ungodly hour but found nothing. 

The barely furnished room was still, immersed in the blue dimness. The air was ringing with a buzz of night wildlife, cool against his skin. 

He plopped back down on a mattress. Grains of sand gritted under his head, but he ignored it; there were no escaping it, sand bursting into homes, into clothes, in this windy town surrounded by desert.

And when he closed his eyes, determined to catch a few hours of sleep, he heard it. Just at the edge of earshot; a creak of stairs, a rustle of clothes. Someone sneaking down a corridor. 

He sprang to his feet before he could question it, and leaped towards a window just as he had envisioned in half-formed worst-case scenarios. A room not on the ground floor but on the first - easy enough to escape through a window but not to sneak in. 

He felt it in his guts - they came for him. He knew it could happen the moment he crossed the line, bribed the antique shop's seller to sell the map to him.

The window didn't budge. He almost laughed - of all the things he could have forgotten, he has forgotten _this_? To check if it can be wide opened?

Well, why would he when day heat was enough to melt his brain, and night cold enough to freeze his balls? 

He cast a look over the room. Everything in him screamed he didn't have much time left. After a moment of hesitation, he grabbed his blazer and cushioning his elbow slammed it in the glass. It shattered with a sound as loud as a cannon shot. 

He was one leg through the window, just about to plunge into the street below it, when the ground escaped from under his foot. Someone pulled him; he could hear the fabric of his shirt tearing before he crashed into the floor.

And then everything went black.

A splash of water into his face successfully returned him to the world of the living. 

" Oi, devil spawn, just five more minutes," he muttered into his collarbone before he realized in what position he was.

Sitting on a chair, its hard seat digging in his tailbone, hands bent behind his back. Throbbing pain in the back of his head swiftly supplied memories of last night - a failed escape through the window, someone grabbing him and knocking him out.

Yikes.

For a moment he considered closing his eyes, going limp, and pretending to be unconscious no matter how much water would get spilled on his face - he just felt like being difficult, besides, you can't torture someone who is unresponsive, can you? What's the point? It would just make you look stupid, losers - but then he saw the legs of a table in front of him.

Cheap, knocked together unevenly. Vaguely familiar, just as a mixture of smells - of freshly brewed coffee, and booze. Yesterday drunk booze, and then half-way returned through the same orifice.

Something in his neck cracked when he jolted to look around him.

To his astonishment, he was still in a bar above which he has rented the room. 

Just tied to the chair, seated behind the table with two unknown men who were finishing their breakfast, judging by the look of half-empty plates with remains of scrambled eggs.

He fidgeted. If strangers aimed for look of a stereotypical rough guy doing dirty jobs, they got it top-notch right - from bulky posture, through muscles flexing under their T-shirts, to square jaws. Combined with handguns lying beside the plates - in a lesser man it could awake atavistic urge to flee.

Even the butter knife glistened ominously in their hands.

He could imagine them using it to impale his hand just because they didn't quite like the look in his eyes.

He was born like this! Should he show them his baby pictures where he spotted a deadpan expression, clearly already unimpressed with whatever the world was offering?

Or more likely with someone taking his naked pictures without his consent, _but the point was_ , while they probably spent last month pummeling some poor souls and then kicking them some more, he was enjoying throwing " Have you any glass eyeballs? Or chastity belts?" questions in other people's faces, and watching them struggle to keep them straight, and _then_ explaining he was asking it because of the sacred and most respected activity - _job_.

In the true manner of a gleeful and pure-hearted child he actually was.

He hoped after all this, he wouldn't need glass eyeballs himself.

Behind the men, there was a card on a counter with drawled in a rush " On break, be right back," on it. On break _his_ _ass_. He glanced over his shoulder. And tightness in his throat got a bit more difficult to ignore.

The bar was never fully empty, its patrons either sobering, or starting to lose themselves in an alcohol-induced daze, but...

It didn't mean much in his case.

One man seemed to have drunk himself into a stupor, staring at the wall with dull eyes, his colleague snoring on the floor, _and everybody else was very carefully not looking in his direction._

His stomach churned.

Congratulations, this was more of a shithole than he at first had suspected. He didn't know it was possible to go lower than his first assessment, but here you go, color him impressed.

He turned back to look at his captors. Thugs. " Oh, please don't mind me, enjoy your meal." 

_Just get over it._ What could they do? They needed him alive if he had to lead them to the treasure - after memorizing the route he didn't destroy the map for no reason. 

" Oh, we are." One of the men, ThugNr1, sent him a smile that raised the hair on his neck. The man's eyes were empty like a well in the middle of the desert. " It's on you, after all." 

" Wow, that's so nice of me," somehow he managed to stammer.

He couldn't pretend anymore all they wanted was to ensure he would talk with them while respectfully holding an eye contact, therefore, after he clumsily knocked himself out, they tied him to the chair to keep him upright and be able to talk face to face, that's how considerate they were. 

As if. Gosh darn it, _as if._

There was something about the way they felt at ease there, in a public place, with him tied and at their mercy. The nonchalance with which they were finishing their meal.

Silent confidence of a predator, having their prey caught, wondering about the way of playing with it.

And everybody else knowing better than to intervene. 

Just when he thought it couldn't get any worse, the door slammed open, and the way too well-known individuum waltzed in the bar in all his unarmed-lecturer-and-bad-haircut glory.

" Gentlemen, after you finish I would like to have a word with him."

For a split moment Gintoki felt like bursting laughing or dropping dead, he couldn't decide. Because, oi, what was that? It seemed like a premise of a bad joke - a thug, a treasure hunter, and an archeologist meeting in a bar. And doing what?!

What on Earth a fan of digging in dirt could do in such a situation?! In a place with bad cell phone reception, far away from any post of law-enforcement, with no weapon! Bore them to death with the recitation of regulation on something-Gintoki-didn't-bother-to-remember?

Sweat dripped down his chin. He could feel the attentive stare of ThugNr2 on him.

" Do I know you? Is that you, Oogushi?" he drawled while pretending to squint eyes at the newcomer as if barely recognizing the man. 

That was not the best moment to introduce the bane of his existence to lovely thugs one step from twisting a fork in his kidney. Or admit to acquaintance with him at all - that was the perfect moment to turn around and skulk away with a scowl on the face, but Hijikata wouldn't be Hijikata if he acted the way he wanted him to. 

" Stop calling me that, permhead. You know exactly who I am." The man casually dropped himself on a chair near the entrance.

Gintoki bit on his cheek. Metalic taste of blood bloomed in his mouth. He was by a hair from yelling, _Run, fool, get lost, it's not safe here,_ but he could still feel a scrutinizing stare of Thug Nr 2 on him, just waiting for any indication he cared about the newcomer and use that against him. 

" Oogushi, I'm kinda preoccupied at the moment." He gave him a pointed look. _See those guns, idiot?_ " What about meeting later, somewhere else?" He laced his words with all indifference he could muster. 

Hijikata stared back at him with a blank face. Then he reached into his messenger bag; with a corner of his eye, Gintoki saw ThugNr1 tensing behind him, and he couldn't help but do the same.

_Just don't do anything rash, don't-_

" That's alright, I got a book," Hijikata waved it, a fucking book. " I can wait," he added, seeing his expression. 

As if to demonstrate that, he started leafing through it while making thoughtful expression. 

Gintoki stared at him. Something dark passed in front of his eyes. 

Probably common sense and his probability to survive this.

 _What was this?_ The buzz in his head - was it Karma's wheels turning against him? Had She enough of all his half-assing and bullshitting through the life, and sticking a piece of chewed gum in the hair of rude drunkard the previous evening was the last drop?

It certainly felt like it. Since when _Hijikata_ was deliberately difficult for the kicks and giggles of it? Did he get a sunstroke? Should Gin-san hurdle a glass of water at him just in case? Hopefully, it would hit his temple - it either would knock him out or sober him up.

Or some tropical fever drove him crazy? Oi, oi, then he should have let nature take its own course, why dragging Gin-san into this? 

Read a room a little, Mr Shiny-Hair! You just don't walk into a gunfight with nothing but an attitude to get on the nerves of everyone! Even Gin-san knows better than that! Did the man think he was at a lecture hall with his precious university pupils, still innocent and full of unshattered dreams? He even wore a dark blue shirt that complimented nicely his eyes. 

And then Hijikata tore away from the book and looked him straight in the eye. 

Ah, scratch that, the only things they complimented nicely with were daggers and arrows, and promises of death.

Jaw clenched, eyes drilling holes into Gintoki's skull - he was _pissed_. 

Ah, maybe Gintoki shouldn't have left a bill for his stay in Kair on him, after all. Everybody knew it was a tourist-trap. Or was it still about Zimbabwe, the way he - accidentally, mind you - seduced an heiress of a local tribe, _and then her brother,_ and got access to an ancient tomb before him? 

Well, excuse-him-much, nobody asked him to follow Gin-san and disturb his work either! 

Okay, maybe actually someone asked him of that. That was probably his job description - securing historical remains and all that. But! Did he actually have to do it? Why couldn't he bullshit his authorities with some bullshit excuses, and for instance, join him in the search? Who cared about some boring exhibition gathering dust in a museum, anyway? He would have gladly accepted his company as long as he hasn't been looking for a reason to get him arrested. 

But that was it, wasn't it? He always went for the wrong guys, too stubborn for their own good about their values, or they went for him or his map, a.k.a. the doting thugs, attached at the hip to him, currently watching him like mother hens worrying about his acquaintances.

" Oogushi," he stretched his lips in a smile. " Can we have a book club meeting later?"

He tried to catch his eye again, to communicate that it wasn't the best moment to stomp the feet and throw a tantrum, but Hijikata chose exactly that moment to pretend being engrossed in his piece of literature.

Or maybe the nutcase actually was. Who knew hot-tempered nerds, maybe they enjoyed reading the most when everything around them was burning and falling into pieces, and someone they knew was held at gunpoint. 

"Enough." One of the thugs put down the fork, and somehow this simple gesture was enough to make Gintoki feel his stomach drop somewhere below his feet and dangle uselessly there.

" Right, right, I was just about to tell you something important." He returned his attention to him, trying to sound convincing, not panicked. 

No matter their strained relationship, he was not about to endanger the innocent bystander. 

"About time." The man leered and turned towards Hijikata. " Just need to take care of one prissy pants problem." He grabbed one of the handguns. 

Fuck. He could struggle, try to block his way - it will not get him enough time to stop him from shooting Hijikata, but _he could try-_

A heavy hand landed on his shoulder. " Let's be still." ThugNr2' voice was low, carrying a promise of bodily harm wouldn't it be complied with.

He could only watch the other man stroll towards the archeologist and point the weapon at his head. 

The deadly hush fell upon the bar. Nobody looked directly at them, pretending to be busy, while watching them with the corner of their eyes. Silent. Not intending to butt in.

Why would they? For them, they all were foreigners getting rich on their land, on the heritage of their ancestors, dangerous and greedy. 

He stomped down the urge to avert his gaze from the upcoming train wreck. He couldn't.

A diversion. One moment of distraction. He needed only that.

" Any last words?" The thug hovered over Hijikata.

" What." The archeologist looked up with glazed eyes. 

Gosh, he _really_ was reading the book, poor, attractive, oblivious, fool. 

And then Hijikata headbutted the man. 

Few things happened at once. 

Blood spilled, and the thug groaned in pain, and grabbed Hijikata's collar instead of pushing a trigger, and cutlery and plates flew into the air when Gintoki kicked the table.

For a moment everything seemed to suspend in the air, but then Gintoki shot to the feet, spun around, and using momentum and all his body weight slammed the chair into the other man.

He wasn’t sure what he tried to accomplish - all he knew he wasn't going to sit still and let someone die because of him; he didn't expect the chair to fall apart upon the impact. In an instant bindings around his hands got loose.

Once he recovered his footing, he leaped towards Hijikata, pulled his arm, and dashed through the door without looking back.


End file.
